


Liar

by plsnskanks (orphan_account)



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Gen, angsty, just a weeee bit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-14
Updated: 2018-03-14
Packaged: 2019-03-31 05:48:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13968660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/plsnskanks
Summary: scouts on the way out





	Liar

He's thinking about a lot of things. About how yes, Scout's shirt is a darker red than the Mannco issued garish shade. About how yes, those wiry limbs are a shade paler than he has ever seen them and yes those lips are a worrying shade of blue.

About how exactly his mother's face is going to look when he has to tell her how and why he let her son die. As well as how exactly he’s going to explain the years of bare to no contact.

About how he spent the last few years of his son's life working next to him every day but never told him, never explained to him....

There's a point in every skilled liar's life where they are put face to face with the cost of having this second face, this alternate life, this other identity outside of the one they actually inhabit. He can feel that debt weighing on his shoulders now as he looks down at his dying son.

He looks small and crumpled and not anything like the man he had grown accustomed to fighting alongside. He had seen him walk off cuts, burns, breaks, gunshots, and now here he is torn open and lifeless in a way that somehow seems surreal, even after all that.

You see, the one thing he had always stupidly assumed he had had was time. Time to write out careful letters to be delivered post mortem to the man he had watched grow up from the shadows. Time to explain, time to apologize, time to make amends.

But here he is faced with a cracked hourglass laying on its side bleeding out its sand and he realizes that one, life of course is never fair. But also it dawns on him that maybe after near three decades he doesn't have a right to this anymore. A right to taint his son's dying moments, a right to drag his fading focus onto the one person that had been glaringly absent his whole life. 

He turns away, putting a hand to his face, Mundy watching him silently, knowing well enough not to speak.

He was never there for him then, so why should he get to be there now?

Scout never needed him. He didn't need him coming home with black eyes in and bloody fists in middle school. He didn't need him to get over the first girl that ever really cut him deep. He didn’t need him to find his self-worth or direction in life. He didn't need him to figure out how to live on the battlefield and he certainly doesn't need help figuring out how to leave it either.

So he does what he's done his whole life and puts on a brave face, which really, is any face other than his, and he turns back around to see his son.

He wants to remember him any way but this. He can take him bold and cocky and brash, yelling out, whooping annoyingly loud as he's running like nothing can possibly weigh him down, bridging gaps no one else would dare attempt and making it look easy. Taking gunshots as a challenge over a warning. Pushing on when everyone else is telling him it’s over. Lost cause. Give up.

He's bold and stupid and above all else he is, he's... He's Jeremy.

He tells him the words he spent twenty-seven years too afraid to say with his real face.

"I'm proud of you. I've always been proud of you. Son."

The words are out and for all they mean or don't he's said them and the remaining regrets are his to carry and his alone. His hand is on Jeremy's shoulder and he's staring into eyes that look so startlingly like his mother's and he can see her face that night so long ago, the way the streetlights caught and highlighted the soft curves and gentle slopes of her face. That smile and those eyes, not unlike her son’s.

Its eerie how the old things you love come back in new forms.

He remembers seeing him, tiny and unsteady, take his first steps. Chubby little body wobbling across the room, at least attempting to, before promptly falling flat. And then getting up to try again. And again. And then a near decade and a half later he’s seeing him in an oversized Mannco uniform, soar past the physical tests and into a position right alongside him. And it was then and a thousand other small moments like it he had this deep, longing urge to say it. To tell him.

His eyes shut and it hits him all at once that everything he had thought to do tomorrow was null. There were hundreds of letters he never sent and rehearsed conversations he never had and maybe this was how it was inevitably going to go.

Running and lying and cheating and in the end the biggest loser short of the dead was him.

His one respite from all this is that it's Mundy of all people with him. The man who'd probably love to put a knife in his back more than anyone else on the team, but who at least knows when a moment of quiet is due. 

So they hold the peace a moment longer and then the bushman, he swears to god the bloody bushman, reaches behind himself, scratches his ass, sniffs it and says, "Sorry about your son mate."

And because idiocy loves company, lo and behold his son is breathing again. God. Damn. Blood on his suit and everything.

And there he is, the proudest idiot he’s ever known, standing on two legs again, heavily bleeding from one side and grinning like he’s already won whatever it is they’re even fighting for this time. He’s not as smart as deft or as skilled as Spy, he knows that for sure.

But there’s something about him, something about that toothy grin and those eyes that catch the light, the heat, the ferocity-

That familiar feeling is in his chest and now is not the time, but tomorrow, surely tomorrow.

He’ll tell him.


End file.
